Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature by Robert D. Richardson (review)

Splendor of Heart is a tribute by one great contemporary literary biographer, Robert D. Richardson, to another great biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, who was his instructor and mentor. Richardson is the author of three acclaimed biographies of American writers: Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006). Bate (1918–99) is best remembered for his biographical studies of Samuel Johnson, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955) and Samuel Johnson (1977), and his 1963 biography, John Keats, as well as several major literary critical texts and anthologies of literary criticism. Among the latter are Criticism: The Major Texts, an anthology he first assembled in 1952 for use in his own innovative course in literary theory at Harvard; and The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1971).

Bate joined the English faculty at Harvard in the 1950s when that department was home to a rich milieu of influential writers and scholars. I.A. Richards, Harry Levin, Perry Miller, Alfred Harbage, Douglas Bush, and Archibald MacLeish were all on the faculty; Northrop Frye held an honorary professorship; and among the school’s many visiting readers and lecturers were Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Eliot, and Robert Penn Warren.

The first half of the book (pages 1–59) is Richardson’s tribute to Bate; the second (pages 61–123) is an extended interview, conducted in 1986, by the scholar Robert Paul Russo, in which Bate ranges freely over such topics as writing, teaching and mentorship, the arts of biography and literary criticism, literature and popular culture, and the future of English and the humanities. (More often than not, this almost 30 year-old interview seems uncannily current.) The volume concludes with a bibliography of Bate’s major publications.

Richardson brings Bate colorfully to life through anecdote, remembered conversations, classes, field trips (in the mid-1950s the entire Harvard English Department boated to the Dry Salvages, a cluster of rocks off Cape Ann and the inspiration for the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets), and Bate’s eclectic and inclusive zest for books, arts, and culture in all their forms. We learn that Bate venerated Four Quartets yet also indulged a strong appetite for pot-boiler fiction. In his later years, with his biographies and other major scholarship behind him, he took childlike glee in a visit to Disneyland. For fun, he liked to drive his 1946 surplus navy Jeep on bumpy roads at high speeds, “with branches lashing both driver and passenger” (33).

From the perspective of the contemporary scholar and teacher, perhaps the most valuable part of this book concerns Bate’s dynamic ideas on scholarship and teaching. In contrast to Richards and other senior faculty at Harvard, who subscribed to New Criticism, Bate took a “humanistic” position that literary texts are inseparable from lived life. Under Bate’s tutelage, writes Richardson, “We expected to be saved by literature, especially by poetry” (13). Bate taught that “Culture is not just knowing the best that has been thought and said, it is the active emulation of the best” (14). He liked to quote Alfred North Whitehead: “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.”

Novice and experienced instructors alike can learn from Bate’s pedagogical principles and practices, which are articulated both in Richardson’s tribute and in the interview with Robert Russo:

Read literature aloud, in class and out of class. Literature is as much an art of the ear as of the eye.

Avoid reading from notes when speaking or lecturing in class. Know your material so well, and be so impassioned by it, that you can keep eye contact with students and only occasionally look at a note.

Identify all possible points of connection that can be drawn between the literary text and life, in its manifold forms, outside the text.

Teach literature like you love...